Hydroponics Lab (Concept + Process)

Retcon

Hey peeps, wanted to show my latest work and share some process with you for anyone who's interested. I went through some serious trials and tribulations on this one and learned a lot. Open to all critique, and also questions if anyone has some. Cheers.


















Thanks for taking a look. More work on and process stuff on my artstation:
https://www.artstation.com/artist/oliver

Stinkhorse

Thanks for the full process breakdown. I especially like the use of photos as a time saver. Smart.

Gaurav Mathur

Very nice!  How much time did you take on this from start to finish?  Are you putting UVs on any geometry in MODO, or do you add most of your texture detail in a paint-over pass?

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Retcon

@Gauravcm, I was working on it on and off for a few months, a lot of trial and error, and tons of failure mostly because hard sci-fi is out of my comfort zone. I wanted to force myself to do a project like this to kind of dead-lift design.

I didn't use any UVs just because it would have extended the process and since the results are going to be 2D, it can be more dirty underneath. For the textures, it's a combination of keyshot (great for metal, reflections and water) as well as photos (nasa projects, plants, smaller lab props), and then a little bit of paint and subtle tweaking of blending modes to make it all cohesive.

Hopefully that's helpful, and thanks for your interest!

Tomiajayi

Really cool technique you have.
I wonder if it's quick enough for production concept art drafts/iterations though?
Definitely great for finals

Retcon

@Tomiajayi : Some people are good enough to pull this stuff on in a few days. I'm not there yet. One of the other reasons it took so long is because on props like the rotary pod I got kind of carried away with detailing the model out. If I stuck to basic primitives, it would have been faster. I also modeled out a bunch of stuff that I didn't end up using in the final shot because I was just experimenting a bit.

Tomiajayi

yeah that's what I meant. I think for drafts you need to be able to spit out like 2-3 a day. not neccesarily top quality rendering or anything but enough detail to get the point across.  Just from a production standpoint.
Maybe you can work on a 2d draft + 3dmix final style?